Day: October 30, 2010

[John’s] latest build strikes a chord of nostalgia by realizing the Banana Jr. 6000. The whimsical hardware is the product of the Bloom County comic strip. It first appeared in 1984, the same year as the Macintosh. [John] used a Mac Plus as the case but completely revamped the insides. An 8″ touchscreen takes the place of the original cathode ray tube. There’s also a Mac Mini and a couple of speakers salvaged from other Macs. To get things looking just right he altered the case’s logo, painted it yellow, and even altered the Leopard operating system. Now when you boot up you’ll see a Banana and not a partly consumed pomaceous fruit.

Do people enjoy wasting 300$ on a bulky convoluted system, that only works for special “Teacher Edition” calculators, and is several years out of date; E.G. the TI-Presenter? [Benryves] certainly does not. So instead of purchasing a TI-Presenter, he made his own TV out system for the TI brand of calculators by using an ATmega168, a few passive components, and some clever code. The only draw backs being: you save 280$, it fits in your pocket, and it works for almost any TI calculator. Bias aside, the system does actually have a few caveats compared to the commercial edition, but the pros far outweigh the cons.

Gizmodo University is open for business. This free educational series aims to educate about the basics of electronic theory. No prerequisite knowledge needed and they’re starting from the ground level. First lesson? Resistors! From there they’ve posted about voltage dividers, series/parallel circuits, Ohm’s law, and how to calculate a resistor value for an LED.

This is a great way to get the base knowledge that you need to start hacking like an EE. These are concepts that we assume you have already mastered if you’re following along with our AVR Programming series. We’re hard at work on part three but that’s still a little ways off. You’ve got time to do a review a GizU and reread our favorite book on electronic theory.

If you’ve been frustrated by the inability to skip past parts of DVDs on OSX the here is one solution. It’s a patch script that uses some binary hacking to remove the User Operation Prohibition locks from DVD playback software. Using UOP flags is a way to force users to watch trailers or warnings as part of the DVD experience. This script can patch Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard systems. It also has the ability to generate diagnostic information for other installations that will lead to expanded support in the future.

[Aram Bartholl] is building his own filesharing network that screws those fat cats who want to control your freedom. He’s added file cache devices throughout NYC (five so far but more to come) that are anonymous and free to use. Upload what you want, download what you want. They’re completely offline which means monitoring who’s doing what gets a lot harder and quite possibly requires a warrant from a Judge (we’re obviously not legal experts, your mileage may vary).

As for the slew of comments that are sure to point out the dangers of malicious USB device; We think everyone knows they’re taking on some risk when connecting to a USB plug protruding from a brick wall.